Author: Robert H. Zieger Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 9780807846308 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 508
Book Description
Robert Zieger charts the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) from its founding in 1935 to its merger with the American Federation of Labor in 1955. The book combines the institutional history of the CIO with depictions of working-class life in this critical period.
Author: Alexander S. Leidholdt Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807145912 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 547
Book Description
A longtime columnist for the Raleigh News and Observer, Cornelia Battle Lewis earned a national reputation in the 1920s and 1930s for her courageous advocacy on behalf of women's rights, African Americans, children, and labor unions. Late in her life, however, after fighting mental illness, Lewis reversed many of her stances and railed against the liberalism she had spent her life advancing. In Battling Nell, Alexander S. Leidholdt tells the compelling and ultimately tragic life story of this groundbreaking journalist against the backdrop of the turbulent post-Reconstruction Jim Crow South and speculates about the cause of her extraordinary transformation. The daughter of North Carolina's most prominent public health official, Lewis grew up in Raleigh, but her experiences at Smith College in Massachusetts, and later in France during World War I, led her to question the prevailing racial attitudes and gender roles of her native region. In 1920, Lewis began her storied career with the News and Observer. Inspired by H. L. Mencken's scathing criticism of the South, she soon established herself as the region's leading female liberal journalist. Her column, "Incidentally," attacked the Ku Klux Klan, lobbied against the exploitation of mill workers, defended strikers during the notorious communist-organized Gastonia labor violence, mocked religious fundamentalists who fought the teaching of evolution, and decried lynch law. A suffragist and a feminist who saw women's rights as inextricably linked to human rights, Lewis ran for state legislature in 1928 and was one of the first women in North Carolina to be admitted to the bar. In the 1930s, however, Lewis faced repeated institutionalizations for a debilitating bout of mental illness and sought treatment from Christian Science practitioners, spiritualists, and psychotherapists. As she aged, her views grew increasingly reactionary, and she insisted that she had served as a communist dupe during the Gastonia strike and trials, that communists had infiltrated the University of North Carolina, and that many of her former progressive allies had ties to communism. Finally, many of her opinions completely reversed, and in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, she served as an influential spokesperson for the South's massive resistance to public school desegregation. She continued to espouse these conservative beliefs until her death in 1956. In his detailed retelling of Lewis's fascinating life, Leidholdt chronicles the turbulent history of North Carolina from the 1920s through the 1950s, as industrialization and racial integration began to tear at the region's conservative fabric. He vividly explains the background and ramifications of Lewis's many controversial stances and explores the possible reasons for her ideological about-face. Through the extraordinary story of "Battling Nell," Leidholdt reveals how the complex issues of gender, labor, and race intertwined to influence the convulsive events that shaped the course of early twentieth-century southern history.
Author: Mark L. Kleinman Publisher: Ohio State University Press ISBN: 9780814208441 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
Historian Kleinman juxtaposes the intellectual and professional lives of two the key figures in US history after World War II to explore a fatal division in American liberal thinking about domestic politics and international relations during and after the war. Wallace, who started in agriculture and served as vice president, did not rule out a cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union; Niebuhr, an internationally respected protestant theologian and political commentator, categorically rejected dealing with any communists at home or abroad. He argues that Wallace's defeat in the 1942 campaign for president perpetuated the climate of fear that only melted during the Vietnam War. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Michael Dennis Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350179159 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
Through moments of social protest, policy debate, and popular mobilization, this book follows the campaign for economic democracy and the fight for full employment in the United States. Starting in the 1930s, Dennis explores its intellectual and philosophical underpinnings, the class struggle that determined the fate of legislation and the role of left-wing civil rights activists in its revival. Demonstrating how the campaign for full employment intersected with movements for women's liberation and civil rights, it explores how social groups and oppressed minorities interpreted and appropriated the promise of full employment. For many, full employment provided an indispensable path to racial and gender emancipation. In this book, Dennis uncovers the class dimensions and the resistance to full employment in the US. He demonstrates how the recurring debates over full employment consistently exposed the contradictions inherent in a capitalist society and challenged the assertion that an allegedly free enterprise system automatically generated employment for all.
Author: Robert H. Zieger
Author: Curtis Daniel MacDougall
Author: Alexander S. Leidholdt
Author: Mark L. Kleinman
Author: Michael Dennis
Author: Stephen Vaughn
Author: Eleanor Roosevelt
Author: Frank Emspak
Author: Gideon Boas
Author: Michael Francis Urmann